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A comment on Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was still around?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was... by sitkack on Monday October 15, 2018 @11:50PM (#18226292)
My favorite feature was 'near' queries. One could project n-dimensional spaces to any arbitrary lower dimension with the right semantic and spatial distances.

With Altavista, the limiting factor was the searcher. And my nostalgia that over-estimates the size of their search database.

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Re:Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was... by sooheon on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @01:10AM (#18226710)
> One could project n-dimensional spaces to any arbitrary lower dimension with the right semantic and spatial distances.

I'm incredulous. Doing this well for unstructured text would be worth a lot in many industries today, let alone the entire web. If they did this well, they'd still be alive and well in another form.

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Re:Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was... by nl on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @01:49AM (#18226903)
Near queries are easy on unstructured text. Here's the Elastic systax: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...
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Re:Ask HN: What discontinued company/product do you wish was... by dogecoinbase on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @01:35AM (#18226834)
Maybe a smaller search corpus made it feasible, but this is an accurate description of AV's functionality. From http://jkorpela.fi/altavista/ , which is worth reading in its entirety: The operator NEAR ensures that both are within ten words of each other in the resulting documents. The operator NEAR binds less tightly than the operator NOT and associates to the left.
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